Inter Press Service - October 29, 2001
James Hall

While the health ministry dawdles on a comprehensive programme to combat a virus that currently infects 25 percent of Swaziland's one million population by the ministry's estimate, on the local level innovative projects are bringing relief to infected persons and their caregivers.

In recognition of their role in combating the effects of AIDS in their communities, a group of Swazi mayors were presented with the 2001 Commonwealth Award for Action on HIV/AIDS at a ceremony in Melbourne, Australia, recently.

The city manager for Swaziland's central commercial hub Manzini, Terry Parker, is an Australian, and he and mayor Fikile Mthembu were at the forefront of a breakthrough programme to identify children left orphaned when their parents succumbed to AIDS, and to coordinate financial, medical and other assistance to them.

Although the alliance of Swazi mayors represented civic leaders from the capital Mbabane, the southern town Nhlangano Pigg's Peak to the north, and Siteki to the east, it was Manzini's programme that broke ground in Swaziland, and is providing a blueprint for the other municipalities to follow.

The Commonwealth - an organisation of about 54 independent states which were formerly part of the British empire, established to encourage trade and friendly relations among its members - cited the mayors for their innovative approach linking local action with national policy-making and international partners.

The local action stemmed from the desire by a Catholic priest, Father Larry McDonnell, a long-time educator and activist for the poor to bring recognition to the "neediest of the needy" in an informal Manzini urban settlement called Skoom.

As the Commonwealth citation noted, the programme that resulted was linked to a national policy of poverty alleviation that was placed at the front of the governmental agenda of Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini.

The final link was with the UN Development Programme (UNDP), which provided financing and logistical support.

Reliable data about AIDS in Swaziland was hard to come by until recently. Another UN agency, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), provided the first comprehensive survey of the impact of AIDS in Swaziland in 1999.

Reading the UNICEF findings, government, non-governmental organisations, churches, and charity groups knew they were faced with a hydra-headed crisis: not only was the HIV infection rate high, with concomitant economic and social misery inevitable, but also at least 35,000 children would be left orphaned by the epidemic by 2002.

The traditional Swazi social safety net, in which orphans are absorbed into extended families, was already overwhelmed.

Some of these orphans find their way to urban centres, and scramble for survival as street children, sleeping beneath bridges and begging or stealing to stay alive.

Some children in Manzini have migrated to the Skoom, which is also inhabited by single mothers and elderly people whose children have died of AIDS and who have no means of support.

Father McDonnell, who has been involved in Swazi education, street children and orphans for 30 years, says, "The pilot project's beneficiaries represent a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of thousands of orphans who need assistance, boys and girls who we don't even know where they are."

But at least a survey of Skoom taken as the first step of the orphan identification project located children in need of assistance. These proved to be not just orphans, but children whose lives were in danger from acute poverty.

Attorney Fikile Mthembu, who was mayor when the project began, says, "Volunteers surveyed the shanty settlement to determine the number and location of children whose parents have died of AIDS.

In most cases, the cause of their parents' deaths are unknown, but given the pervasiveness of AIDS in Swazi society it is fair to speculate that the epidemic caused their demise," he says.

The pilot project has been completed, and with press coverage of the report's findings, most of the city's residents became aware for the first time of the existence of the secluded Skoom shantytown.

Pholile Dlamini of the Swaziland AIDS Support Organisation was involved in the survey.

"The big question about the programme is whether it can be replicated throughout the kingdom. We think it can, because it follows the ways of Swazi life and custom by working through consultation, with established traditional leadership. We make an appeal to the Swazi sense of community, of looking out for one another," says Dlamini.

The challenge, says Dlamini, is to keep the customary approach in an urban setting, where migration has severed the connection to rural homesteads. "Here we cannot go to a chief for assistance, but a city council answerable to the voters. At Manzini, and among the other mayors, we have received positive response for the need to provide care-giving guardians for the orphans we have identified."

The neglect and squalor of the orphans in urban areas has shocked Swazis. And some traditional authorities argue that it was one of the reasons the palace called for a return to chastity amongst girls with the introduction of "umcwasho", a set of lifestyle rules that require post-pubescent girls to remain virginal for the next five years.

Health officials have applauded the decree as a good way to reduce the rate of HIV infection.

One sceptic toward "umcwasho", Manzini resident Thembi Shongwe, who at 18 would be one of the maidens affected by the so- called "sex ban", wonders whether a sudden return to the morality of an earlier time can work amongst modern Swazi girls.

"And what about the boys? If they don't take a vow of chastity, it will make it harder for the girls," she says.

As the debate over the "umcwasho" issue shows, the kingdom is groping for ways to meet its formidable AIDS challenge.

But the new AIDS orphans programme introduced by the town mayors, which is now recognised by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) officials as worthy of emulation throughout Africa, testifies to a will and seriousness to confront a national crisis most effectively on the local level.
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